PBS with Closed Captions Solved

I have finally found a solution to getting PBS with CC, but it requires that you have PlayOn.

  1. Have PlayOn installed
  2. Sign up for a free account with PBS.
  3. Register your PBS account in PlayOn.
  4. Wait one week after desired program premiers on PBS.
  5. Download program using PlayOn.

If you don't wait a week you will get a message saying that the content requires a PBS Passport subscription ($5/month). I'm not sure how long after the one week mark the content will still be available.

You could just use ytdlp. Subs are usually downloaded too if you set it to download it

I'm a Windows person. YT-DLP seems beyond my skill set. It took me quite a long time to get Docker running.

There's plenty of guis for that for windows. Just use one of them

I loaded YT-DLP-GUI and got it to download a program from PBS. It came through without Closed Captions. Unless I'm missing something, this is not a solution to my problem.

Did you set it to download subs automatically?

I found no instructions or settings menu. There was a checkbox saying "Subtitles". I checked it. I tried Format=Best and Format=MP4.

Ooohh...I get it now. You're using a different gui. Here's one I use

I loaded the GUI you are using. I checked: "Embed subtitles in video file". Still got no subtitles.

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Yeah...probably is DRMed then

It wasn't for me but I don't use PBS often nowadays

There are only 3 shows I ever watch on PBS, but 2 of them are British. Bad hearing and British accent adds up to needing subtitles. As I said at the start, PlayOn passes PBS with subtitles, so I'll stick with them.

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